Driven to preserve drive-in memories

Woman assembling oral archive of town’s outdoor theater

Drive-In Movie Memories project

The Pioneer Room Friends are asking people to share their memories and photos of the Escondido Drive-In by calling (760) 839-4315 to schedule an oral interview. People can also e-mail pioneerroompress@yahoo.com, or drop off a written account at 247 South Kalmia Street, Escondido.

Drive-In hall of fame

Two drive-in theaters remain open in the county out of nearly 20 during the heyday of drive-ins.

If you go: Single screen; cash only; management reserves right to “spot-check” inside of vehicles and trunks; open seven nights a week year-round; snack bar; movie soundtrack transmitted over FM radio frequency; vehicles 65-inches or taller (trucks, SUVs, cars with hatchbacks and motor homes) must park in orange lines only; customers may sit outside vehicles in chairs only; sitting or laying on ground or on vehicle roof not permitted; portable jump kit available in case of dead car battery; no dogs or barbecues; no cash refunds.

• South Bay Drive-In Theaters

Opened: 1958

Where: 2170 Coronado Avenue, San Diego

Information: (619) 423-2727, or southbaydrivein.com

Showtimes: 8:30 p.m., box office opens at 8 p.m.; late show Fridays and Saturdays only

Cost: $7 ages 10 and older; $1 for children ages 5 through 9; free children 4 and younger

If you go: Three screens; cash only; management reserves right to “spot-check” inside of vehicles and trunks; open seven nights a week year-round; snack bar; lawn chairs and coolers permitted; movie soundtrack transmitted over AM/FM radio frequencies; no dogs

Its towering metal screen had been blank for more than a quarter century when it was demolished last year.

Still, colorful memories of the Escondido Drive-In flicker in the imaginations of longtime Escondidans like MaRaya Schrokosch.

Schrokosch recalled her first visit to the once-thriving venue, in August 1973. Its marquee lights beckoned to her road-weary children, who had just moved with her and her fiancé from Illinois to Escondido.

They began to chant, “We want to see the movie!”

Schrokosch pulled into a Kmart across the street (now a Loews store) and peered inside the hollow cavern of her purse.

“We didn’t have enough money to get all six of us in,” she recalled. “What is a mother to do?”

Schrokosch, then 31, crouched down on the floor of the back seat, beneath her children’s feet as her fiancé proceeded through the ticket booth.

More than three decades later, one of those children, Schrokosch’s daughter, Cathrine Laguna, is collecting memories of the outdoor theater for a written and an oral archive at the Escondido Library’s Pioneer Room. The group hopes to display the memorabilia.

Laguna, who is president of the Pioneer Room Friends, recalled with fondness the clunky metal speakers that attached to car windows, and the crackle and hiss it lent the film’s soundtrack.

“In movies like ‘Grease’ — in any good movie that has to do with the ’50s — they showed at the drive-in,” Laguna said. “It’s a pastime that shouldn’t just fade away.”

Jeff Johnston, son of Escondido Drive-In owner Dan Johnston, began working in the drive-in’s concession stand when he was 16.

Johnston said his father employed bouncers to watch for people trying to skirt the admission fee.

“There’d be a car that would roll in with a couple people, but in the trunk there would be four more,” said Johnston, 62, who now lives in Aspen, Colo.

“If somebody acted nervous … you would Walkie-Talkie to the field crew and tell them to watch a given,” he said.

The Escondido Drive-In opened July 6, 1950, at its original location at 755 West Mission Avenue. The price of admission for that night’s feature, “The Boy from Indiana,” was 50 cents. The drive-in could accommodate about 320 cars.

California political hopeful and former President Richard Nixon made a campaign stop at the drive-in that year, and in 1962, a local pastor began holding Sunday worship services in the lot.

Films such as 1959’s “Ben Hur” sold out several times a night. Dan Johnston moved the drive-in to 635 West Mission Avenue in 1967 to accommodate the thriving business.

“He could put another couple hundred cars in the new location,” Jeff Johnston said. “It was growing. It was doing well.”

People would generally start to arrive 45 minutes before the movie began, while it was still light outside.

“It was quite a social thing,” Johnston said. “On Friday nights, during football season, it was a big thing to take your date to the drive-in.”

An intermission gave people time to satisfy their hunger and try Dan Johnston’s special chicken and shrimp dinners at the concession stand.

By 1982, however the drive-in had become victim to the VCR and the multiplex. The Escondido Drive-In’s ticket sales plummeted from its heyday of 1,500 a night to less than 20 when its final film was screened, John Travolta’s “Blowout.”

A sign was placed at the entrance saying “closed for the winter,” though it never reopened as a drive-in.

“It really kind of became a dinosaur,” Johnston said. “Its biggest nemesis was the extraneous lighting. As the area grew, you’d get a bunch of street light and that would cut out 25 or 30 percent of the viewing picture.”

Laguna said she sees a potential to revive the tradition.

“You can rent out a drive-in for family reunions and show your family photos up on the screen,” she said. “I see a whole new future for the drive-in theater.”